Thursday, June 30, 2016

Digi has launched the Digi Challenge for Change (DigiCFC) Season 7 on 16 June 2016 with the mission of Building Mobile First Solutions for Social Impact.

DigiCFC is an open and inclusive programme and competition for Malaysians to contribute ideas for mobile applications that benefit society. In this exciting season of DigiCFC, they are looking for revolutionary mobile app ideas that are able to address the current issues surrounding 3 main target groups, namely children (below 18 years old), youth (below 40 years old) and women.

Idea submission is opened now until 17 July 2016.

Top 30 ideators will be invited to #ideajam where relevant industry experts and mentors will review their ideas. 3 Winning Ideas will walk away with RM5,000 each.

Mobile application developers, designers, analysts are also invited register their interest in DigiCFC website. At the second stage of the event, they will be invited to build on the 3 winning ideas. Teams must submit their finish product by 19 August during Hack@DigiCFC.

The winning teams ideators and developers will proceed to the POC with a seed grant to mobilize the solution to the community.

Grand Prize Winner will take home RM50,000 and an all-expense paid trip to Digital Winners Conference in Norway. Good Effort Prize Winner will take home RM10,000 for both finalist.

This programme is open to Malaysians (above 18 years of age) from all walks of life.

Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Attention job interviewers and interviewees, the information below could be useful to you to successfully get the right person (for interviewers) or win your dream job (for interviewees).

Many HR adopts 2 important person specification models by Alec Rodger and John Munro Fraser respectively to match a job description with the ideal candidate to fill the job. Each of them gives certain headings under which the attributes of the ideal person can be classified.

Person specification is a profile of the personal skills and characteristics to look for in the recruitment and selection process.

Rodger's 7-point plan:

Physical make-up: health, appearance, bearing, speech and manner.

Attainments: education, qualifications, experience.

General intelligence: ability to define and solve problems.

Special aptitudes: skills, attributes or competencies relevant to the job.

Interests: work related or leisure pursuits that may have a bearing on the job.

Monday, June 27, 2016

Scholarships2u.com is an interesting website, acting as a one-stop gateway portal to scholarship information and application for Malaysian students of secondary school, college, or university up to Master degree, to study either locally or abroad.

The website aims to make finding the right college and scholarship faster than before with just a click of the button. Students can apply to scholarship offered by multiple institutions, and are required to sit for a scholarship test as assessment to the application.

The basic criteria to meet scholarship eligibility are school transcripts, achievements, family background and etc. The criteria, however, differs from country to country, state to state and even college to college.

The website is a good initiative for parents and students seeking for scholarship as financial aid to study. However, I find that improvement could be made for the website to list the scholarships offered in a better way, and to provide a better search function. Apparently, the website is using Wordpress as its platform, which has many limitation for its feature expansion and future growth.

The website is organizing Scholarship Fair 2016 with over RM10 million worth of scholarship to be offered for studying in world class schools, colleges and universities from Australia, Malaysia, Switzerland, USA and United Kingdom.

Considering its high toner price and I found difficulty to get a printer repair shop who are willing to repair this Dell printer, I decided to replace it with a new Samsung Xpress SL-M2885FW/XSS mono multifunction (print/scan/copy/fax) laser-class LED printer.

I have chosen a mono laser printer this time rather than a colour laser printer, as I found out that I seldom need to do colour printing. This BLI award-winning mono laser MFP which cost me RM698 (inclusive 6% GST) is much cheaper than the colour laser MFP available in the market. In addition, it only has black toner to replace instead of 4 toners which cost a lot when replaced at the same time.

One of the beauty of this Samsung M2885FW printer is that its imaging unit is separated from the toner, which helps to bring down the cost of the toner. The imaging drum unit MLT-R116 has a page yield of up to 9,000 pages and cost around RM175 for replacement, while its high-yield toner MLT-D116L with page yield of up to 3,000 pages cost about the same price with the imaging unit. There is an alternative standard-yield toner MLT-D116S with page yield of up to 1,200 pages cost around RM100 only.

The easiest way to setup this Samsung M2885FW printer is to first connect it to the computer using USB cable, configure its TCP/IP settings so that it is accessible with network cable or WiFi LAN. The printer also supports WiFi setup using WPS method.

There are 2 ways to obtain and install its required drivers and software applications. One way is to install from its installation CD, another way is to install the Samsung Printer Software Installer and Samsung Printer Diagnostics which you can download from Samsung support website for SL-M2885FW/XSS.

You can make use of the Samsung Printer Diagnostics software to install and update the drivers and related applications to the latest version.

Other ways to setup the printer's TCP/IP network settings including using its control panel with 2-line LED display, which might not be convenient, and to connect to the printer using WiFi Direct, then continue with the configuration, which might need some technical know-how before the attempt succeed.

There are 2 important software that you need to install namely Samsung Easy Printer Manager and Samsung Easy Document Creator.

The Samsung Easy Printer Manager has 2 modes. The Basic Mode (or I call it end-user mode) is a clean and straightforward screen that tells you the printer's status, and provides quick button access to its scanner functions (which handled by the Samsung Easy Document Creator application), fax functions, user's guide (which is a comprehensive user manual) and some other basic functions.

The Advanced Mode (or I call it administrator mode) provides more detailed information about the printer, including its serial number. It also allows you to perform some settings configuration here.

There is a reason I said setting up TCP/IP for the printer is important. Apart from making the printer accessible via the network once the TCP/IP setting is done, it also enables you to have access to its powerful Samsung SyncThru Web Service which you access by connecting to port 80 of the printer's IP address using your web browser.

The number of information you can get in SyncThru Web Service is even more than Samsung Easy Printer Manager Advanced Mode. It also provides you much more control to the settings of the printer.

You can gain even more access by login as administrator in SyncThru Web Service. The default username is admin and its default password is sec00000. Once logged in, you can replace this username and password with your own.

It prints and/or copies really fast, at speed of up to 28ppm. Much faster than the Dell 1355cn.

Its print output is of high quality. Resolution can be as high as 4800x600 dpi.

Its scanner support high resolution of up to 1200x1200 dpi optical, and 4800x4800 dpi maximum.

It has built-in support for automated double-sided printing, which is a feature normally available in printers of higher range.

It has built-in support for ID copy to easily copy double-sided cards (e.g. IC, driving license, business card, ...) onto the same page of A4 paper.

It has built-in support for Google Cloud Print, Samsung Cloud Print, and Apple AirPrint.

It is small in size, even slightly smaller than the Dell 1355cn.

It has low power consumption of 1.6W during power save mode, 2.4Wwhen sleeping with WiFi direct on, 50W during standby, and 400W when printing.

Its paper tray is of drawer type, not exposing the papers in front of the printer. The tray has input capacity of up to 250 sheets of papers.

It has easy to use Eco Mode which helps to save toner and/or paper usage.

What I dislike about this printer?

Its 2-line LCD display panel has limited display area. It is not practical to perform setting directly using its control panel.

When putting in A4 paper in its paper tray, there is still slight exposure of the paper at the back of the printer.

It supports NFC, which needs to function together with WiFi Direct. However, my phone's NFC contact with the printer most of the time not successful to bring up the Samsung Mobile Print app. It is not easy to make use of this function.

The Samsung Printer Installer unable to detect and download the latest firmware for the printer, and the Scanner Driver is always in "update needed" state even if the latest version already installed successfully.

Sunday, June 5, 2016

If you are going to start up a new business in Malaysia and would like to check whether the company name you thought of is available or not, now you can check it online for free, with SSM e-Info website.

Other than the above purpose, you can use the same website to check a Malaysian company's information at a small fee payable online. Available information including:

Company profile: consists of company information, summary of share capital, directors/officers, shareholders, company charges and account summary.

Company charges: extraction of information from Form 34 (Statement of Particulars to be Lodged with Charge) and Form 40 (Certificate of Registration of Charge).

Financial comparison: extraction of information from 2 most recent Audited Balance Sheet and Profit and Loss Account of the company.

Business Profile (for LLP, sole-proprietary, partnership): consists of business information, business address, nature of business, branch information (if any) and current business owner.

Business Termination Letter: certification of termination of registered Business from SURUHANJAYA SYARIKAT MALAYSIA which verify that the Business is expired or terminated.

In the good old days, you need to go to the office of Companies Commission of Malaysia (Suruhanjaya Syarikat Malaysia, SSM) to perform the searching, checking and information purchasing. This SSM e-Info website eliminates the hassle by making the service available online.

Before you can perform any searching in the website, you need to register a user account by clicking on the "Register Now as e-Account Member" image link on the website. The registration is free and once your account is successfully registered, you can immediately login and make use of the services available.

You can search the company or business by name or by registration number.

If no search result displayed, then the company name you searched for is probably available for new registration application.

If the search found any matching company/companies or business/businesses, it will display their registration number, name, city and state in search result, and you can click a button to purchase further information of the company/business.